CIVISTI is supported by the European Commission under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Programme within FP7 (Seventh Framework Programme) . The initiative involves 7 European countries: Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Malta, Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria, with the coordinating body being the Danish Board of Technology.

CIVISTI is designed in a way to give the citizens from these countries an opportunity to define and communicate their visions and transform these into relevant long-term scientific, technological and innovation issues. The main idea behind is that citizens are the carriers of concerns and expectations for the future . With the right facilitating methods, such concerns and expectations can be collected and transformed into relevant research agendas.

In short, CIVISTI will:

• Produce a list of new and emerging issues for European S&T ;
• Produce a set of policy options of relevance to future European framework programmes;
• Base these products upon a novel process of citizen participation in seven Member States, supported by the analytical capacity of experts and stakeholders.

Тhe project will make a long-term view into the needs, concerns and visions of and to the future. Citizens in seven European Member States, who will be prompted in a structured way to consider different aspects of the future, will make these visions. Secondly, a process involving experts and stakeholders will use an analytical model to extract the new S&T agendas from the visions of the citizens . Thirdly, the citizens will be consulted again to validate and prioritise the new S&T agendas and policy options . Thus, CIVISTI will contribute to the expansion of the European foresight capacity and will establish a new concept for citizen participation in long-term foresight. CIVISTI will also attract new researchers into forward-looking studies by including partners and participants, who are new or have limited experience with foresight and foresight-like activities.

For more information, please contact Ms Zoya Damianova: zoya.damianova@online.bg, or visit the CIVISTI web-site http://www.civisti.org/